American Horror Story Delicate recently aired its finale, and in my review of the final episode, I mentioned a few things that I believed this season of the show had gone wrong, but I felt like I didn’t get everything out there in the open. This episode has become the lowest rated episode of American Horror Story ever, according to IMDb, which exemplifies the show’s current situation after 12 seasons.
After a few more days of thinking about it, I decided it was time to address the finale and the entire season and explain why I believe it didn’t work. So, lets get started. Here’s why American Horror Story Delicate did not work. Just so you know, this will contain spoilers.
Spoiler Alert!
The Mid Season Break
The mid-season break. One of the main factors that I believe harmed AHS Delicate was the hiatus that occurred before the final four episodes were published. In September 2023, we were handed the first five episodes of the show for five weeks in a row, a structure that many of us are accustomed to when it comes to watching a TV series and absorbing the plot.
However, after the fifth episode completed in October 2023, there was a nearly six-month gap during which no episodes were telecast. But then, in April 2024, the sixth installment was released, and it continued in successive weeks until Episode 9 on April 24th.
This is something that I believe has greatly harmed this season of the show. The midseason finale drew approximately 239, 000 viewers. Then, six months later, when episode six was published, it drew 243,000 views. As a result, it did not harm the eyes that were exposed to it.
However, from a storytelling standpoint, we were thrown out of the world. The tale, the familiarity of it, and we were practically expected to catch up on what had happened six months before and be able to simply reenter and carry on as if no hiatus had occurred. At that point in the programme, the tale was fairly complicated and full of mystery, and it lived on keeping us, the audience, guessing what would happen next.
So, because there was a significant time gap between the stories, we had no idea where they were heading. It felt like there was a significant disruption in the way the story was conveyed to us. When you look at the watching stats for the finale, they were actually lower than when it first returned with the first episode of Part 2.
The finale attracted 232, 000 viewers, and the penultimate episode the week before only brought in 158, 000 viewers, numbers that were never really existent in Part 1, as in the first four weeks it was in the 400, So I believe that taking that gap meant that some viewers of the show may have been unaware that it had returned, and as a result, they just stopped watching it.
However, it created friction in the way the plot and series could be consumed. Granted, the writer’s strike most likely played a role, but I believe it was ultimately detrimental.
The performances of the cast members
I believe this season of American Horror Story featured some of the worst performances we’ve seen on the programme in a long time.
AHS New York wasn’t the best, but I believe the cast members performed substantially better than Delicate did. I stated in my review of the programme that Cara Delevingne was not good, and I still believe so. She was actually one of my least fave aspects of the entire season.
I believed that whenever she was on screen, her lines were delivered in such a stale manner that it felt like she was reading them from a script, and there was a sprinkle of melodrama and amplification of her performance to compensate for the fact that she is not the best performer there. Furthermore, the accents she was required to perform were completely unconvincing.
So she was a major problem in the series. In addition, I believe that the whole cast was not of great calibre. Kim Kardashian grew on me throughout the programme, but she didn’t start out fantastic and didn’t end up being incredible. It only made minimal improvements.
However, characters such as Nicolette, Talia, Kamal, and the Ashleys received a significant amount of screen time, and the performances did not fully immerse me in the environment or characters. Emma Roberts as Anna was the only performer I believed did a nice job on the show this season. She and Dennis O’Hare carried this season largely due to their acting abilities.
He, like Emma Roberts, is a seasoned Murphy cast member in terms of American horror stories, thus neither of them gives a horrible performance. In truth, their time together in Freak Show was quite enjoyable. So, for me, the fact that only Roberts and O’Hare had credible, consistent performances is an issue.
Because that represents two persons out of the entire cast. Plus, Dr. Hill was rarely present in Part 2, despite being such a significant player in Part 1, so we lost him midway through.
The finale
One of the season’s major flaws, in my opinion, was its finale. I believe that, despite the decreased viewership for Part 2 of American Horror Story, the quality of the story was probably slightly higher if the finale was removed.
This is because revelations were made during the episode. We had the episode Ave Hestia, which centred on Dex’s wife Adeline, and it answered a lot of questions concerning Ivy, Adeline, Sonia, and the Delicates. There was also the episode titled Little Gold Man, which featured an opening portion about the film Rosemary’s Baby being in production, as well as the show’s relation to the novel and film that were published some decades before.
It was also interesting to see the tale centred on Anna’s mother. However, by the finale, it felt as if the episode runtimes had just continued growing shorter and shorter, and the actual screen time in the finale was only about 30 minutes. There was still a lot of unanswered questions in the finale, but many of them were not even addressed.
We discovered that Siobhan was linked with the Delicates, but we did not learn her true identity or how she came to be. There were some reveals, such as Siobhan being Dex’s mother, but they were thrown in without much context. Furthermore, the death of Ivy, with Siobhan’s duty of having Ivy kill Dex as a test, was one of the most absurd things in the entire series.
What is this a test of? Loyalty? Understanding? It made absolutely no sense. I also felt that Siobhan was shown as a big figurehead and leader of these ladies who make deals and then go about recruiting others, but then being wiped out so easy by simply uttering the adoring words to Hestia felt a little weak.
Siobhan had been around for thousands of years, but it actually took Adeline coming back and defeating Anna Siobhan with no defence. It just seemed like there was a huge hole in the fact that it was so simple. So the finale was quite disappointing.
The Lack of Development
One significant concern I had with this show was that there was very little development with the characters or the true plot until towards the conclusion of the season.
Anna’s character was written in such a way that she remained unchanged by the end of the season. There was no sense of relatability or rooting for the protagonist in this episode, which I believe is a huge weakness. Even Dex was shrouded in mystery at one point, but then he was found to be a cheater, and he was simply killed off and no longer appeared on screen.
So, even when there was some kind of advancement, it eventually fell flat and didn’t really amount to much in terms of holding any substantial weight at the time.
Conclusion
To be honest, American Horror Story hasn’t been in great shape for a long time, and some think that the programme simply has to end.
However, I believe that many of us continue to hope that Murphy will be able to restore it to its former glory, but I simply do not believe that will be the case. The fact that the most recent episode had the lowest rating ever is almost like a perfect symbol of the show’s current situation.
It’s unfortunate that the programme has taken this turn, but perhaps it simply requires some time on the shelf before returning. There is one more season that has been formally greenlit and commissioned, so perhaps if it does end, it will do so with a bang. That is something we will just have to wait and see.
